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Jack Handey, of Deep Thoughts fame, shares his treatment for My Nature Documentary in the July 2 issue of The New Yorker. Handey begins:
Show monkey in a tree. Narrator says, “The monkey, proud and smart, in his native habitat. But one thing he does not have . . .” Show a giraffe. “. . . […]

OK, Taggart Siegel’s film rode the festival circuit a couple years ago and was on PBS last June. But in a flip of the usual order of events, The Real Dirt on Farmer John is now getting a national theatrical release.
The film tells the life story or John Peterson, a third-generation farmer, “whose inspirational story […]

Andrew O’Hehir says in Salon that the music documentary Gypsy Caravan is much much better than he expected:
It’s a two-hour movie, and I’m only sorry it isn’t two or three times as long. Let me read your thoughts: You’re not much interested in Gypsy music, and the historical and cultural stuff might be pretty dry. […]

Boyd Williamson, writing at PopMatters, thinks Michael Apted’s Up documentaries “have lost their spine when confronting the class issues.”
Seven Up! was first created as a one-off documentary for World in Action, a current affairs program on British television. It was conceived as a sociological investigation into how Britain’s class system is maintained. The narrator introduces […]

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And if you find truefilm at all useful or interesting, can you do me a favor? Invite some friends to check it out and perhaps subscribe. Even in its current skeletal state, the blog takes […]

Four years after her death, two new biographies of groundbreaking documentary filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl have sparked some interesting coverage.
The New York Review of Books has a good article by Ian Buruma built around reviews the two new books. Buruma begins, “That Leni Riefenstahl was rather a monster is not really in dispute. […]

Josh Caldwell and Hunter Weeks quit their jobs so Josh could ride a Segway scooter from Seattle to Boston while Hunter shot and directed a documentary about the 100-day trip (Josh edited the film). The resulting doc, 10 MPH, just came out on DVD.
I don’t know if I could handle this for 90 minutes, let […]